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Tuesday Tips: Recycle Those Wine Corks Into Something New!

By chance I have a collection of wine corks. When I say by chance, it always felt odd to me to toss away wine corks into the trash. Wine corks seem to tell a story or quite possibly spark a memory of one night. So instead of the trash, I'd stick the corks in a drawer. The drawer full of corks turned into a hurricane glass full of corks on display.

Am I attached to my display of corks?

No, I'm not.

In even better news, Whole Foods Market just announced this week they have partnered with Cork Reharvest to create a cork recycling partnership. What does that mean exactly? There will be boxes at all 292 Whole Foods stores in the United States where you can bring in your old wine corks. Only natural corks are accepted for the recycling program. Whole Foods will then ship the corks off to different locations where they will be recycled into something new, such as wine shippers containing 10% cork or cork floor tiles or turned into post-consumer products. Pretty cool, huh?

Some cork facts from Cork Reharvest:

Harvesting Cork is a 100% natural, renewable, recyclable and biodegradable material that is obtained through an environmentally friendly harvesting process.

Hand-Harvest for Long Life Trees are not cut down to harvest cork, rather, the bark is stripped by hand every 9-12 years. Cork oak trees can live up to 300 years!

There is enough cork in the cork forests of Portugal and Spain to last more than 100 years.

The introduction of new products, such as composite corks, allows even better utilization of existing cork resources, using granulated cork that can be obtained from smaller pieces of raw cork otherwise unusable in the production of conventional punched cork.

I have a bunch of corks too and the idea of a cork wreath is just not all that appealing. So, I filled an apothecary jar with them, found a flat, clear glass candle holder to set on the top of the jar like a lid, wrapped some raffia around the top of the jar and now have a candle holder everyone wants!